The place I work for has a super large GitLab repo that I don’t need to pull. I only need a specific directory to be able to work in, and push commits to the repo.

I have tried following guide on how to do this, and below are the commands I run

mkdir <dir>; cd <dir>; 
git init
git remote add origin <GIT_URL>
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo <dir1>/ >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull origin <pull_branch_name>

However it still tries to pull the entire repo, instead of just the single directory I need. I check the .git/info/sparse-checkout file and it contains the dir1 that I need.

Ways to fix this or alternatives would be greatly appreciated!